Stephen Hawking – Memphis Flyer

Gene Hackman in ‘The French Connection’

Welcome to the first installment of our ongoing attempts at dream interpretation. Today we take on infinite regress, gritty lawyers and road rage:

Gene Hackman was in a movie in the ’70s, and then decades later he was in the same exact movie remade with the same title, almost shot for shot. The opening scene was a bit different. Instead of getting out of his car in an irritated fashion, he parked at the end of a long line of cars. His irritation was more about where he had to park. I remember a long wall, and someone walking away down the top of it, arguing to someone below. The movie had lawyers, and gritty conversations about the law.

Dear Mundane Dreamer,

Sometimes, in moments of existential frustration, I will reference the opening lines of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Hawking opens his book with an anecdote about an eminent scientist who, while giving a lecture about the nature of the universe, is interrupted by a little old lady who maintains that the world is merely a flat plate resting on the back of a giant turtle. “But,” retorts the scientist, “What is the turtle standing on?” and the lady says something to the effect of “You stupid asshole. It is turtles all the way down!”

Dr. Seuss, from ‘Yertle the Turtle’

It is turtles all the way down! I think this is what your dream is about: Hawking’s stacked tortoises might as well be your long line of cars, or a movie that is the same shot for shot, or the bottomless gauntlet of boring B flicks from the seventies. You look for something deeper in your subconscious offerings and find only minor permutations of what you have seen before.

But you need not despair, MD, because if the Cosmic Turtles of Infinite Regress have anything to teach us, it is that we contain unseen multitudes. Same-ness doesn’t preclude depth. Maybe your dream is trying to tell you that something you previously saw as unremarkable was actually the point. You simply need to re-envision it, probably with the help of Gene Hackman. (What was this movie called, by the way? Was it Rest Easy, or You Can Sleep When You Are Dead? Jokes, jokes.)

In honor of Hawking’s little old lady, I will also advise you to check out the paintings of American folk artist Grandma Moses. I once heard an interview with Grandma Moses, who started painting at the age of 78, during which she said, “People keep telling me that the snow is blue. But I look and look at it and I can’t see any blue. So I just paint it white.” Was the snow blue? Was it white? Who knows. The point is that she kept looking.

Grandma Moses, ‘Winter’

Yours truly,

Eileen

We here at Exhibit M are taking a stab at dream interpretation, with the help of art and anecdote. Do you wonder what your dreams are about? Send them to: eileen@contemporary-media.com.

Even in a century of scientist heroes that includes Einstein, Salk, and Bohr, Stephen Hawking stands out. He was the first to try to reconcile the very large world of relativity with the very small world of quantum mechanics. He helped prove that black holes exist, then proved that even they don’t last forever. He became a popularizer of science, writing a bestselling book that introduced many to the science of time. And, of course, he did it all while fighting Lou Gehrig’s Disease, doing his most profound work as a public figure confined to an electric wheelchair and communicating with the world through a computer voice.

The Theory of Everything is based on a memoir by Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde, that attempts to look behind the myth and reveal the real man living behind the voice synth. It opens with a bike ride through Cambridge in 1963, where Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a promising, if somewhat scatterbrained, doctoral candidate in astrophysics and cosmology, which he defines as “a kind of religion for intelligent atheists.” When he’s not turning in impossibly elegant mathematical solutions written on the back of train schedules, he does what all of the other young scholars do: awkwardly chase girls. He meets Jane (Felicity Jones) at a house party and is immediately enchanted; but in a bit of foreshadowing of their eventual relationship, she has to give him her number, because she knows he would have asked if he had thought about it.

Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne

Just as Hawking is formulating his first big ideas that would earn him his doctorate, he is diagnosed with motor neuron disease and given two years to live. Jane insists they marry anyway, and she puts her own studies on hold to minister to him while he works on his world-changing science.

Directed by James Marsh, who won an Oscar for his 2009 documentary Man on Wire, The Theory of Everything resembles Walk the Line, in that it tries to illuminate the character of a “great man” through the lens of his great love. Hawking’s accomplishments are complex equations written on blackboard, and thus not as cinematic as Johnny Cash playing Folsom Prison. But like Walk the Line‘s Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, this movie soars on a pair of strong lead performances. Jones is self-possessed and compassionate as Jane, who bears the burden of caring for her husband and their three children until the cracks begin to show. Redmayne’s physically demanding performance as Hawking brings to mind Daniel Day-Lewis’ Oscar winning turn in My Left Foot. The film is at its best in the early going, as the lovers move through sun dappled English campuses with Hawking’s disease creeping up behind them, but it bogs down in the middle with some plodding characterization and the difficulties of explaining the complex science that is its subject’s life’s work. But The Theory of Everything ultimately wants to live in the heart and not the mind, and in that, it succeeds admirably.